714 From Video Games to MSP Success: Brian Weiss

Hello friends, before we start today's show, I just want to take a minute and acknowledge the importance to take a moment today to acknowledge the significance of September 11th. This day marks the anniversary of a tragic event that profoundly impacted our nation and the world. On September 11th, 2001, nearly 3,000 lives were lost in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks.

The shock and sorrow felt on that day continue to resonate with us, reminding us of the fragility of life and the strength of the human spirit. In the years since, we have witnessed incredible acts of courage and resilience from first responders and everyday citizens alike. Their bravery in the face of unimaginable circumstances serves as a testament to our collective strength and unity. 

As we reflect on this day, let us honor the memories of those we lost and support the families who continue to grieve. May we also strive to embody the values of compassion and solidarity that emerged in the aftermath of the attacks. Thank you for joining us today and let us remember to never forget.

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals everywhere, where we try to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. This is our Wednesday live show. We're doing another afternoon matinee, and I've got my new friend in the house, Brian Weiss from ITECH Solutions. 

Brian, how are you? Doing great. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Well, thanks for coming on, and thanks for accepting my forgiveness for dissing you out in Denver. No worries. All right. 

Before we get started with today, I want to acknowledge, last night I had a quick communication with our friend Matt Rainey, and for those of you that do not know, Matt Rainey was the original talent for this show back when it was called Podnutz Pro. He and I have stayed in touch, and they are going to be experiencing a hurricane that is making landfall probably about now, and it was originally aiming right for his location. It has since moved east, so he will be on the less dirty side of the storm, so he won't be getting the full brunt of those hurricane winds. 

So, for those of you that know Matt Rainey, you may want to send him a quick note of encouragement, see how he's doing after this hurricane goes through, and he does say hello to everyone, wishes he was going to attend TechCon, but he will not. He will be dealing with Hurricane Francine instead. So, just wanted to get that out there.

Let's see here. I'll take care of other stuff later. We've got some great news and stuff, but Brian, I asked to be on the show because of several reasons. 

One, I like to get new people on here and like to hear the stories of how people got their business going, and then, of course, how people get it to a certain level of success, because I think a lot of people listening to this show watching this video are going to be like, dude, Brian's got it going on. So, let's chat about that. Yeah, I never like to tell myself that I've got it going on because I do feel like success is a journey, and you don't want to feel like it's a destination, and we have reinvented ourselves quite a bit over the years. 

We're definitely not the company we used to be, but yeah, I can kind of start from the beginning. I got into computers primarily because I love video games. I think most of us did that, and going to LAN parties and who's going to figure out how to network everything together? It was kind of like, oh, let's figure this out together and kind of learn it. 

My high school year, I had my one required period for my units, and six periods, I actually was going around the district fixing computers, which was cool because all the teachers loved me, and then right out of high school, I worked for kind of a mom-and-pop shop called Computer Stuff. Believe it or not, I love the name still, and worked there for about three years, and what was interesting is I got a lot of good experience there kind of working in the field. It was primarily residential services, but we had business clients, and so we started out as one store, and I realized this need to separate out business services from residential. 

We actually called it commercial back then. I didn't know what else to call it, and so we created this team of five technicians that I managed that was focused just on businesses, and what that did is it allowed the company to grow. We went from one to three stores, and it saturated the county, but still had that mom-and-pop feeling and that conflict of interest in my head of we're also doing residential services, so there was a point in time where I kind of outgrew that company in the sense that we I wanted to do more, and so I went off on my own as an independent contractor. 

It's a classic story of got an office in my garage, and I was lucky enough to have some clients that still wanted to use me for their IT services after I left, actually a fair amount of them. I felt kind of bad that they left, but I made sure it was a cordial thing. They weren't under contract or anything back in that day, but I was kind of an independent contractor from 2002 to 2005, and then it was like 98 to 2001 I was working at this mom-and-pop shop.

By 2005, I had grown to the point where I needed employees, and one of the engineers I managed at the old company actually went to work for a web development company, and he became their lead web developer by that time, and so I recognized a couple other things. Our clients needed websites, and I had this idea of what I called back then a web-based software, which is really SaaS. I didn't know what SaaS was back then, but I saw this future of, hey, we can move things to the web, and things will be easier than the traditional client-server relationship.

So when we started ITECH in 2005, it was my business partner, me, and then actually one of my clients, who was from the diamond and jewelry industry, that invested to help us get started, and then the first three years, it was kind of just me doing my IT thing. I did hire one other person, so I wasn't like a single point of failure necessarily, and we focused strictly on growing web, and we grew that to about a team of five people in three years, and we were focusing in the diamond jewelry industry. I'm a certified gemologist.

I went through all of that courses, because I used to help them get clients themselves, and then also marketing was kind of a big thing, and then 2008 hits, and naturally, we have that recession. So let me stop you right there, because I want to make sure we get all of the breaks in their order as well as the state of mind that you're in. I want to go back to the store, because I also worked at a store before I went on my own.

The difference in my story is my boss didn't want to do on-site at all, and only allowed, he allowed us to do it as long as it was after hours, and as long as we purchased any parts we needed from him. And he had an opportunity to open up a couple of different locations, and he chose not to, and one of them was literally across from the University of Miami, which we thought, you know, as the technicians that worked in the back were like, dude, we could get so much recurring business from the university, and we could probably find people to staff the store and stuff, but he wanted nothing of it, and that was part of the reason I actually left. So that was kind of interesting for you to be able to develop that business side along with the residential side. 

Now, were you actually a store where you were, you know, building and selling computers, or how was it? Yeah, so, you know, Dell and Micron and Gateway were around back then, but we liked custom building. We felt like we could develop a better, more reliable product with an OEM type build, and so that was totally what we did. It was, we'd sell a bunch of computers, build them all from the ground up, burn them in, right, the old burn in, leave it in overnight, make sure nothing goes wrong before you deliver it, and that was fun. 

I mean, I kind of miss those days. We don't build computers anymore, that's for sure, but I think that type of background also helps you understand how to troubleshoot computers better. You know, maybe someone coming new into the industry that doesn't ever really open them too much didn't have that experience, but in all honesty, devices, you know, workstations are kind of turning into toasters these days anyway, where you don't put too much money into trying to keep them run a long time. 

You know, you've got a lifecycle management where, you know, if it's a power user, you might be replacing it every three years. Hopefully, you're not stretching it past the five-year mark. We all know there's clients that will go seven years or run it into the ground if you let them, you know. 

Had that conversation today with a client that they have one server that they want to just keep up and running, and when it dies, it dies, which is odd because they're actually running some production software on it, but he's like, yeah, we don't really use it that much. We just, we would like to keep it, but we're not going to replace it. So I'm like, all right, interesting. 

2012 server, if you can imagine that. So not to go off on a huge tangent, but we've got a new client we're working with right now that is running a very old version of Epicor that they don't even support anymore, and they want to keep running it, and so we're setting up a whole change control staging environment where we're not doing anything in production ever, right, and we're testing out all the updates we're doing around the operating system it runs on and everything. Any changes that might happen to it, we're always doing it in a test environment first before we roll it to production.

So, you know, you can hang on to old software, but you should put extra contingencies in place because it will fail, right, and it's got a lot more single points of failure than a newer system might have. Well, they're going to sign a piece of paper that says when it fails, that's it, and they can't hold us accountable. I'm not even going to try to keep it up and running.

That's good. Yeah, you don't want to be footing the bill for that, for sure. All right, so you leave the store and go out on your own. 

Now, was there something specific that made you decide it was time to leave the store and go on your own? Yeah, thank you for slowing me down, by the way, because I can do an hour monologue on here and tell my whole story and not really get into specifics that people might be interested in. So, that's a great question. Yeah, I mean, here's what it came down to. 

I was recognizing gaps and mistakes that were happening because of lack of proper process, and I was identifying processes to try to prevent those from happening again. And while I was getting buy-off on the owner, who also worked on computers, mind you, he wasn't bothering to follow them. And so, naturally, the team that I'm responsible for managing, it's kind of like, well, he's the owner and he's not following them, so why should we have to? And you kind of start to feel like you're a little bit on an island of, I want to do better, but no one around me cares about it. 

And I had developed good relationships with these clients. As we know in the MSV space, 90% is relationship with the client. If you got a good relationship, you could make it through most hardships that you might run into with a client. 

And so, I could see in the future, man, I love this relationship I have with this client. I can see potential issues happening in the future that I know how to prevent them, but I can't get anyone else to try to follow that same path. And then there was a little, there was kind of a, I was young, didn't know much about business. 

Once I came up with this idea and we saw it take off, before we even started expanding to more stores, I was getting paid as an independent contractor. So we were charging, you know, $75 an hour for labor at that time. And he paid me 50% of that.

So I was making good money, assuming I was billing eight hours a day. Back in those days, I had too much money in my opinion, because I didn't have appreciation for it. I could have invested it a lot better. 

So let me, let me understand real quick, you were working at the Now, were you working full time at the store or after school? Another great question. I was going to college at the same time, which I ended up dropping out of because I was learning more in the industry. So I am a college dropout, classic college dropout. 

I'm proud of that. Definitely made my mom cry, that's for sure. I didn't actually drop out of college until I started ITECH.

And I was going, I was in college for almost six years. Because I pivoted from computer and network services to sound engineering, and live studio or live concert recording and studio recording. Okay, hang on. 

I know we're going off track. Yeah. How? Okay. 

How would you pivot from computers to sound? I've always been a sound nerd. I mean, it goes back to car stereos in my car, you know, and I love music. It's, it's something that's kind of a passion for me. 

I love singing karaoke. And I think what it was, is I was always, I was always a gadget geek. And I love just audio equipment. 

And I was like, well, if I'm not getting anything out of this college computer wise, because they're literally teaching us on 486s while I'm out in the field working with Pentiums, you know, learning more out in the field, what could I get use out of this college? And then I looked at a quest to college, they had a great music program. And they just built a brand new sound studio. And they had all this cool new gear that was like MIDI controlled. 

And you know, and I was like, that's expensive. I could never afford that. But I want to play with it. 

Okay, so I took all the courses I could take until I graduated out of them. And then I asked, How can I do this more? And they said, well, we'd have to hire you as a janitor, because you don't have teaching credentials. And then you can come play with this equipment more. 

But you'd also have to do janitorial work as part of your job role. And I was like, uh, so that was that was kind of when I went full time and decided to start it. I was like, All right, I'm done with college. 

I'm well, and I'm done. In all fairness, I spent three years at the computer stuff place, and then another three years independently, right? While I was going to college. So and then it was like ending college starting it. 

Okay, gotcha. Now, but I dropped out of the computer network services program. Because the other certification we were about to get is for Windows NT 4.0. That was part of the course. 

And I'm looking at the Microsoft roadmap, and their end of life in it that year. And I'm like, so, so I, you know, maybe universities are better now in the tech space. But back in my day, making myself sound old. 

They were always behind. Oh, yeah, they can, they can never afford the newest technology. And then the professors they brought in all came from the military. 

They couldn't even really afford to pay professors that came from the field either. So it was very book taught type of courses, right? And, and being kind of a self-learner, my whole life, I was just doing my homework in class, really is all I was doing. Just so I didn't have to do it at home, because I'd be going to work afterwards. 

So the, you know, the weekends is where I spent most of my time. I was also a DJ. In 2000. 

I started that was another thing, right? As I'm doing the sound engineering and all that stuff. I'm also DJing. So I'm doing clubs, weddings, I'm on the radio station. 

That was about an eight year stint from 2000 to 2008. And why did I stop DJing? I got married, and it was a little bit of a conflict of interest. So I mean, your interest versus your wife's interest? Well, it's, you know, it's not the best setting to be in. 

And even if I just stuck to doing weddings, you know, that eats up your weekends. Yeah. But there was a point in time where I'd be working all day at ITECH, you know, because I started ITECH in 2005. 

And then it's like, Alright, I'm going to go to a club and DJ all night at a club. And then come home and start my day over. And then on the weekends, I'm typically doing why I did the five o'clock traffic jam, you know, on the radio station, I was in between the club. 

And then on the weekends, I do like weddings or clubs. So house parties, house parties, I hated those, though, because you always had to worry about your equipment. And every time the police showed up, it was always the DJ's fault. 

Yes, I'm the one who was always having to talk to the cops. I'm like, it's not my party. I'm just here playing the music.

The worst experience with a house party was it was almost like a raid, where they came in and everyone runs away. And I'm sitting there ball by myself and talking to the cops. And I didn't realize one of the guys ran out with one of my speakers trying to steal it. 

Luckily, it was in this old school heavy walnut case, you know, the best thing I it was like me, my parents Sansui system that I threw some new woofers in. But it was so heavy, the guy could barely get over the fence. So he just ended up ditching it. 

I found it outside. Wow. So don't recommend house parties.

And, but yeah, so, so music has always been a passion. In fact, I just bought a Rodecaster Pro two. And I truly feel like I'm back in my DJ days again. 

Right? I've got the controls. Yeah, I've always wanted to have the multi mics, you got the sound pads. You can attach the wireless stuff, Bluetooth music. 

Yeah. Well, we didn't have Bluetooth back then. But yeah, and I'm just getting to know it. 

We actually had to do a reset right before this podcast, because I had some weird effect on my voice. I couldn't figure out how to get off. Alright, so that sounds like an interesting stretch. 

So you started in 2005 after dropping out of school. And take that you're, you're basically doing break fits, right? Yeah, good call out. And, and then you said in 2008, it sounded like there was going to be a big major shift. 

That's why I wanted to pause you and go back. So what happened in 2008? Besides the rest of the world, going into that housing recession? Yeah, I was, I was kind of freaking out. Because I wasn't, I was still young and as a business owner, and really never even had any business training to tell you the truth. 

I was, I was an engineer, fixing computers, able to make money doing that. Michael Gerber's e-myth. You had that entrepreneurial Caesar.

Yeah, well, and I'm glad you brought that up. Because I have read some books like the e-myth I did read. And I also read the one that still resonates with me today is the four cash flow quadrants.

Okay. By Robert Kiyosaki. And, and that's what made me realize that that's actually what made me want to start ITECH. 

Because I was like, I could do this as an independent contractor my whole life and live a lifestyle business. But unless I'm working, I'm not making money. And so I wanted to become a business owner. 

And understanding the whole time, by the way, you're not a true business owner, unless you can walk away from your business for a year and come back to see it doing just as good or better than you left it. Right? And I'm still not there. 20 years later.

I could go away for, I'd say, probably three months if I really wanted. It would drive me nuts being away from my business that much. But I'd start to worry about things. 

Because I do have a leadership team built out, but not everything. Things still rely on me. So 2008, it was, we don't have steady income. 

We're only making money as much as we bill. And especially on the web development side, it was all project based. So if your pipeline dries up, where's the revenue there? And luckily, on the IT side, while we had established clients, they weren't really paying us unless they needed us. 

And luckily, in the world of IT, they need you fairly often. And so the idea was, how can I fix this issue? And I don't even remember how I came up with this, because I don't even remember thinking it was an MSP thing back then. But I just remember looking at the revenue stream I was getting from each client. 

And it was really easy to calculate back then, because for every hour we worked, we got paid. Assuming the client didn't get mad and wanted a discount after the fact, of course. But it was easy for me to share that story with the client and come up with a formula that says, hey, over the past two years, you've spent X amount of money with us. 

And you've either done it proactively, which means we can come up with a formula to average this out per month. Or you've done it reactively, which means this isn't enough. It uses a fixed fee, and we're going to need to add some overhead to it to handle the proactive things that should also be done. 

And we got about, I don't remember how many clients we had back then, maybe 40. We got about 80% of our clients to sign up for it. Almost no questions asked. 

And the way I really sold it was, we're both, there's a recession. We both don't know what's going to happen with our business. I'm worried about peaks and valleys in my income.

You're worrying about the peaks and valleys in your expenses. Let's normalize that so we don't have to worry about it anymore in our relationship. And we can just continue to work together without being shocked that you might not pay me enough one month or that I might bill you too much another month. 

And told them this will allow me to grow because I'll have a more linear path of growth when it comes to income. So I can more easily tell the next engineer I need to hire versus the way it was before is we'd get a big rush of work. Be like, man, I wish I had an extra engineer right now. 

Right. We get through all of that work. And then I'm like, oh, thank goodness I didn't hire that engineer. 

Right. Because I don't have work for him right now. So it was just this idea, I guess, math. 

I've always been good at math. So it's just and I'm not, I wasn't a financial expert back then. I wasn't doing our own books. 

I had we had a bookkeeper that actually got us about 80 grand in debt from not paying payroll taxes that she decided was OK to not tell us we were paying. And then we got we got a loan from my business partner's parents to pay it off right away to not incur any more penalties and then pay them back over time. So I even I put like sensitive parts of my business and other people's hands thinking they would care just as much as us. 

And her take on it was, oh, well, we just didn't have the money to do it. And I'm like, well, if we don't have the money to do it, that's something that leadership team. I didn't call it that back then. 

That's something I need to know. Right. So that I can make decisions on where we're spending money so we can't afford that, because the one thing there's only two things that are certain in life. 

Right. It's death and taxes. So that was a wakeup call.

But I guess I was smart enough math wise to kind of see this new model that would work better for us and provide security for both us and our clients moving forward. So did you call it anything special, like a preventative maintenance plan or because I had something similar and I worked with attorneys and we called it a base retainer so that, you know, every month we would have X number of hours for X number of dollars. And, you know, the months that we were below the hours, we're not, you know, we're not going to give you the money back because they're going to be months that we go over. 

So the goal in my mind was that we would average out, you know, over a year's period. And then, of course, any projects would always be extra. So funny thing is I've always been big on branding and we actually branded things and thinking that they would take off one day. 

Right. Everyone's going to use this brand name. And we actually had three different kind of offerings that we came up with.

And, you know, one of them we called I tech net manage short for network management, I guess. I don't know. And that was really to cover our tool costs because we had taken on an RMM during that time as well. 

We're like, OK, if we're going to get into this and do this right, we need to have a better tool to try to be more proactive so that we can actually deliver on what we're selling them. Not that we used the RMM to its best of abilities right away, but we used it enough. And then we had our backup, which we called I tech safe backup. 

And you have a little picture of a safe, right? You know, you always got to have a little icon next to it. And then for our for our what we call our maintenance plan, that's really what we called it. It was I tech sentinel maintenance. 

So Sentinel was the thing, right? Like we're looking after things and we're there to maintain it. And that was really where the labor portion came from. Right. 

So we had those three kind of separate lines of business or some we had some clients that were only signed up for the net manage and the safe backup. And we were break/fix as far as how we build them, because like I said, we only had about 80 that went for it. So we knew we needed everyone on a good backup and we knew we needed everyone on the RMM. 

We needed to charge them for the RMM and we marked it up because it was an expensive tool back then. Wasn't much sold monthly like a subscription. It was like paid for the full year.

Sixty five grand. Right. And then and then it's the old school. 

You pay maintenance after that on however many devices are associated with it. More of a perpetual model. So that was a big thing to chew off for us. 

Oh, my God, we're going to spend 65 grand on a tool. When we've got a dev team in-house and we've built our own tools and but we didn't have the sophistication to understand how to build an RMM tool at that time. So we didn't want to attempt it.

So, yeah, that's kind of what we what we jumped into. And then we saw the IT department skyrocket in revenue, especially stable revenue, which then helped keep the web department alive. Right. 

Because we didn't we've always ran our business from like a family culture in the sense that the owners are taking the hit to try to keep people employed even when we're hurting versus, you know, just firing employees if we can't afford them. The answer wasn't firing the employee. The answer was, OK, owners, we got to figure out how to find more business to keep these employees.

So that was that was kind of, you know, anytime you're taking on a big capital expense like that, you're always worried about it. But luckily, I.T. skyrocketed ahead and really held things together for the web department until things turned around after the recession and we were able to start ramping up the web department in different ways that really helped us as well. All right. 

So I'm imagining that probably took you to around what, 2012 to 2014 in that time frame? Yeah, I would say I would say web was hurting for a good solid two years before we came up with a plan. And then really what we did is we developed our own content management system and e-commerce platform because WordPress wasn't a big thing back then and didn't have things like Shopify. And that enabled to start take us to start taking on clients that weren't so jewelry and marketing focused and even start getting e-commerce clients. 

Really, what we realized back then is, hey, if we're going to do web dev for a client, let's do e-commerce because they literally use their website to generate revenue, which means even in the worst of times, they're not going to leave us because that's their revenue source. And that's and then we and then we ran into some other clients that were doing interesting things in the CEU space, the continuing education space, where we built a website for them so that they could deliver continuing education units with a licensed professional. And that's a SAS model. 

We didn't even know it was called that back then. Again, web based application. And we ended up partnering with them. 

We said, we love what you're doing and we want to we want to partner. So we created another company with them and then we repeated that model and about three other industries. And that really is what took off the web department to where. 

And what's funny, there's a point in time where that business was making more net profit than the net profit combined from web and IT. And so my idea of like, hey, in 2005, I want to have a web department. I want to get into the SAS game. 

We did it. We didn't blow up really huge like some of these other SAS companies, but we were able to create this model that was kind of running on its own without it had one full time employee we dedicated to it. And it was making more net profit than the two other companies. 

So that so the idea of multiple streams of revenue is really, I think, what helped us get through a lot of our hard times as we hit them versus relying on a single stream of revenue that when it gets hit, what do you do? Right. So we really what happened is the web department started doing so well, they couldn't keep up with our demands on the tools that we built ourselves, because other than the RMM and Microsoft, we had our own ticket system, we built our own billing system, our own documentation system, we had our own password manager, we built that was all in house. And we needed it to do more so that we could do more, essentially. 

And they had all these cash projects rolling in. And so as a business owner, what do you do? You tell your development team to not accept cash and work on internal projects? Doesn't make sense. And we did track everything on the books to where all the work they did for it, they build us. 

And we saw that leave our profit and loss and go into their profit and loss because we had everything categorized out separately. And so it was, it was a high, I think we were spending like six grand a month on our web department from an IT perspective. It was all internal money. 

So you never left the company. So at the end of the day, as a business owner, it's not like I was losing that money. It was just getting allocated into a different department. 

Right. And so, of course, we didn't want them to turn down cash projects. And it was it was actually about 2015 when we hit this mark.

And I think we were at about maybe 1.2 million then. And that's when I found Autotask. I just stumbled upon it. 

I started looking online. I didn't really know much about the MSP channel, even though we were using an RMM. And it was just like a tool I never really understood.

There's like an MSP channel out there. And maybe in the earlier days, there wasn't much of one. Who knows? I don't think it was huge and certainly wasn't defined as that. 

I mean, there was there were some out there, but, you know, ASTI, you know, of course, was consolidating vendors. But it's obviously not what it is today. Yeah. 

Yeah. So the thing with Autotask is it had dashboards. And that was literally what I had laid out for the dev team. 

Like, hey, we're going to build dashboards. Here's the dashboards I want. And they couldn't get to it.

Cool. We're just going to get this off the shelf product. Now, when I reflect back on some of the behaviors that I had, it's that today some people think I'm crazy and I'm trying to figure out the why. 

Coming from a dev background and creating our own tools, I'm not just going to use someone else's tool without wanting to develop a close relationship with that vendor, their dev team, their product team, understanding their roadmap, helping them out with their roadmap. Because naturally, the minute we get our hands on it and I start seeing it, wishing it could do more. And back in the day, I'd go to my dev team and tell them, hey, I want this to do more. 

This is on the roadmap. You're going to work on this on the next revision. And then it got done because there's no one to push back against that. 

So naturally, if you look at my LinkedIn under organizations, you can see how many partner advisory boards I've been on. Almost every one of a vendor I've used because I think I just naturally had this idea that I'm limited by my tools because I felt that way developing my own tools. And once I lose that power of controlling the roadmap, I want to at least be part of helping construct the roadmap. 

And that worked out really well. And I developed a lot of great relationships in the industry. And it worked out well until priorities changed for these MSP vendors. 

Well, let me go back and ask this because you asked a question that I'm not sure you're ready to answer yourself in terms of people might think you're crazy. And I think you were trying to talk about the roots of where it began and the fact that you were so ingrained with having your hands in the process, whether it was your tools or somebody else's. I think most of us would just look at the fact that, look, I may want a tool to do something, but I'm not going to spend my time to help you figure out how to do it. 

It sounds like you might still be doing this, where you might be saying, look, here's where you need to be. Let me see if I can help you get there. And that may be the pushback that you're thinking in terms of craziness. 

It's like, okay, why don't you run ITECH and let these vendors run these vendors and stop butting heads? Am I on base there? 100%. And I'm not saying everyone should do what I do because without a dev background, it's hard to really understand how things are working under the hood and limitations that the vendor might be facing and what actually can or can't be done with the product. So if it's not an area of expertise where you feel like you can build this better, but I don't want to have to, I'm just going to help them build it better, then you're more just trying to get feature requests added and things check boxed without maybe understanding there's a bigger roadmap in play here. 

Part of our success, when I think of our roadmap, even before we went to MSP Channel Tools, is as we ran into challenges where I identified processes that would help prevent those challenges, rather than rely on a human to make sure that those processes were followed, we would build out the process in a piece of software to hold the hand of the human to make sure it got done right. And in no way did I ever build anything close to what the PSAs can do today. I don't want to make it sound like that. 

We were more of a ticket system. But I understood, I had this idea of, I don't want to waste my time with repetitive duplicate efforts. So I guess for those listening out there, I'm not suggesting everyone runs and is part of a partner advisory board because you could be doing more for your company, focusing on your company, which might be coming to the realization that you need to leave some tools if they're holding you back, versus try to fight to make them better. 

And here's the other thing. A tool should not dictate your process. And that was the other thing I was running into issues within the MSP Channel. 

It was very tool forward, where the tools were meant to dictate your process. And I was in the headspace that I wanted to use tools. And if they couldn't improve my processes, I wanted to try to improve the tools so they could, versus, oh, this tool doesn't do that. 

Well, I'll just do this in a spreadsheet instead. I didn't like the idea of having to take processes and workflows out of the tool and into something else, where all of a sudden you're doing ABC here, pausing, doing DEF here, and then coming back to do GHI over here. Is that the right alphabet? Yeah. 

I don't care, because I understand what you're saying. And part of me is thinking, isn't that what we have empowered the vendors to do, where a lot of MSPs are at the point of like, just show us what we need to do. And so the vendors are saying, okay, we'll show you, and we're going to build the tool, and this is how you do it. 

And half of their webinars and town hall meetings and demos are all about, here's how you need to run your business with our tool. Yeah. And I fed into that. 

Think about it. I was on an island forever. My dev team's not there for me anymore. 

And now I feel like I'm part of this community that knows what's best. And so I get sucked into that. And I spend a lot of time and effort thinking I'm doing the right thing when sometimes I'm just doing the popular thing. 

So there's some truth to that. So I'll just ask, what happened to the dev team? Well, the dev team, I let them do cash projects is what I meant by that. Okay. 

And really what was cool is I saw that six grand a month I was paying them, and I go, oh, that's my budget. I can use that as a budget to go buy MSP channel tools. So I went a little crazy. 

I will say that from 2015 to 17 or maybe a good solid two years, we adopted so many tools and used them to their full advantage, we grew 50%. Whereas historically, we were only growing about 15% on average. So that's the other thing.

That was like, whoa, this is the right thing to do. Stop developing my own tools. Get these tools off the shelf. 

Look at this growth I've had. Because really, it was putting everything in my head about how I wanted to do things into a tool, locking down processes that the rest of my team could follow to be more efficient. Right. 

So let's do this. I'm going to shift your brain here real quick. Because I want to make sure that we get to a couple of other things. 

And we might be tiptoeing into a topic that I think would be another show if we let it go. That's fair. But I want to go back and ask in terms of ITECH and let me first ask this to get you started. 

What is your proudest moment in building your company? In building or running? Either. Go ahead. Yeah.

I would say surviving our 2018 security incident we had, where we had a vulnerability with our RMM that we were unaware of. And half of our clients got ransomed. And it was about a half a million dollars in total damages. 

And we ended the year in a negative 3% profit margin, only lost one client, kept all of our employees, and even rehired one of the employees that left us who came back to help us during that. We kept them around. We didn't have an incident response plan at all. 

So it was really kind of shooting from the hip. The only incident response we knew was disaster recovery from a backup. And luckily, there wasn't data exfiltration happening back then. 

So it was really, that's why it wasn't a breach. It was just an incident. And it was two weeks of hell of restoring backups.

And the team being stressed, but us being there for each other, it built our relationship with our clients, believe it or not. Because yeah, they didn't like being down. But at least, at least they saw us working hard on it. 

And we knew they were there for them when we weren't going to leave them hanging. Coming out of that and surviving that was pretty intense. Because I even, it was such an intense thing for me. 

I became a functional alcoholic through that event and even put myself in rehab for a month. And then I learned things in rehab that I wish I would have learned in high school. And I came out a better leader. 

That was really when I feel like I stepped up my leadership skills. And that was a moment of reinvention for us where we didn't take on any new clients for two years. It was all about securing our own house, learning as much as we could about cybersecurity. 

Because before that, it was just firewalls and antivirus. And then of course, working on securing our clients. Because luckily, we were at a turning point that year, where we were making enough recurring income to cover all of our expenses. 

And so our big loss was really all the projects that we couldn't do or get done, that got pushed back or turned down. So the projects were kind of the icing on the cake. And it made me realize, wow, we've been focusing on grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, without understanding if we've actually secured the income we're already making.

And so it made me reflect and say, wow, we were lucky to lose one client. These other ones are staying with us. We've got enough income to hit our turning point. 

We can go two years without taking on new clients. And what's funny is, we still grew 15% year over year with our existing client base. Because we were going in, we were doing more projects with them. 

It was kind of like re-onboarding the client. We were getting them on new services. Our ratio of what we were billing for support versus SaaS services changed dramatically to the point today, our invoice has about 60% SaaS services, 40% support on average when we bill our clients.

So what's funny is, it turned us into more of a SaaS reselling model, right? Where, wow, our income's shifting from support-heavy to now SaaS service-heavy because of all these extra security services we were putting in that then helped secure that income better. And then, of course, cybersecurity insurance requirements, as those are coming along, we're a bit more ahead of the curve with being able to answer yes to a lot of that stuff. That was a major turning point for me, definitely. 

All right. I've heard the story and it is a testament to survive and thrive through something like that because most companies would have lost more than one client, for sure. Some I know are no longer in business, so kudos to you for that. 

I want to use this as kind of like the breaking point for this show and then whenever I can get you to come back and talk about the rest of the journey because that SaaS journey, that Microsoft security first, I think is something I can stand on its own. Is that okay with you? Yeah, 100%. All right. 

Before we continue on, let me do this because we did not do an acknowledgement earlier of our partners in the show. So let me play a quick video. I'll recognize my partners and then we'll continue on. 

We'll be right back after this. Is your Wi-Fi edge secure? Are you sure? Threats are everywhere, probing the edge for vulnerabilities to gain access to your network. It takes only one weakness for them to succeed.

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I don't have one yet. I'll see what I can do, but I do carry with me the regular CyberScope and the EtherScope in my daily go-bag. I use them all the time. 

If you guys have any questions about those tools, let me know. I had a gentleman that I met, a tech. I went to Port St. Lucie yesterday. 

It's about an hour and 20 minutes, and I met a tech up there who I wanted to have him help support if I need boots on the ground up there, and I can't get up there real quick. So I had him meet me, and we were doing an ISP changeover, and I pulled out my tester, plugged it in, verified the IP. We had done a VPN change, so I did a test from that back to the main office, and I did all that from the CyberScope, and he looked at me, and he's like, really? I said, yeah, that's what I do. 

So great tool. You don't have to worry about pulling out a laptop or connecting to a desktop on site and all of that. I also want to acknowledge SuperOps. 

If you watch the live stream, you'll see me drinking from the mug that is from SuperOps. Streamline your MSP operations with SuperOps, the all-in-one platform for service desk invoicing and product management. And then our third partner here, if you need secure remote access to your Windows desktops, RDS servers, and apps, use TruGrid SecureRDP. 

Provides you your VPN multi-factor authentication and eliminates firewall exposure and internet latency. So head over to itbusinesspodcast.com, click on the sponsor tab, and support those for us. And now we will get ready for your favorite segment on the show, also sponsored by SuperOps, Florida man or random question.

And I asked Brian ahead of time, and he's already acknowledged he doesn't have a story to challenge Florida man. So Brian, I will pull up a random question for you to answer, and then I will share some Florida man stories. Are you ready? I'm ready.

All right. So random question generator. Easy question. 

What is your favorite meal of the day? I would say on days I'm working lunch, on the weekend dinner. Am I allowed to answer it that way? That's fine. That's a good answer. 

All right. And our Florida man story. So first thing I need to do is acknowledge Chad Kempt, who over the weekend, you know, thought he would send me a great video about just another day in Florida. 

I can't post the video here. I'll need to figure out a way to do that. I'll put a link. 

I believe it's to a TikTok or something. And it shows an alligator coming out of the water and being fed by a man in the backyard. So I don't, I think it's an old video. 

I haven't verified it yet, but that's going to lead to today's Florida man story. And a couple of, I think months ago, uh, I had a story about the, uh, the laws, the wildlife laws. And so once again, the wildlife laws are in the headlines because a Marion County man faces multiple charges for keeping alligators in his backyard pool and doing so carries a fine. 

It is a felony because you need a class two wildlife personal pet permit, which costs only $140 a year. It demands proof of extensive handling experience. So why is this such a big deal? Well, because the man that was arrested, uh, let's see if I got his name. 

Oh, I'm sorry. They did not identify his name, but he faces multiple charges into including two counts of possession of an alligator and one count of unlawful take, which I believe that means he yanked it out of the wild. And he is also charged with unlawfully taking slider turtles. 

Um, I'll have to get more information under that, but it's a third degree felony under Florida law to kill, injure, capture, or keep an alligator or its eggs without a proper author authorization, which can lead to significant fines and potential jail time. And then I'm going to include a bonus story because a man is alleged to have thrown a Chihuahua off of a balcony like a football. Dan Chad Sousa of Fort Myers faces aggravated animal cruelty charges. 

Uh, he threw a three-year-old dog named Raven off the balcony after an argument with the dog's owner at a friend's home where they had been drinking. So a witness reported that Sousa through Raven from a third story balcony. And of course it was taken to the hospital, in which case it was then reported to police. 

Just like if you saw, you know, child abuse at the hospital, it's going to be reported. Uh, so I will have the links to both of those and, uh, there's your, and these are both, uh, let's see, Sousa was arrested on September 9th and the other Florida man, I believe he was also on the ninth. So within the last two days, there's your Florida man stories.

So Brian, you couldn't have found anything close to that. No, the turtle one's kind of funny though. Cause we did buy my daughter, a baby turtle from Jersey that, that never showed up because, uh, they, they got it at customs. 

And then we got her teacher to write a letter that it was for educational purposes on the life of a turtle. And then the game warden ended up showing up this big buff guy with a gun and everything on her front door. And he's got this tiny little box and he goes, this is your turtle. 

You've got authorization to have this turtle, you know, and handed it to us. And it was the, it was the funniest thing that, you know, this guy had to take care. He had to hang onto the turtle all day while he was doing all this stuff. 

And then he finally got to our house. The turtle was stopped at customs. Yeah. 

Because the red eared sliders, the real baby ones, they aren't allowed here in California because of some Salmonella thing, I guess that was going around. People were putting them in their mouth or something, you know, kids. Um, so it's, it's still alive in our pond. 

It's, it's about five years old now, much bigger. Oh my, oh my. So you're housing an illegal item at your house. 

Well, and the red eared sliders are allowed here, but not the baby ones. You're not allowed to have the baby ones. Okay. 

Well, I'm sure. Yeah. They're intrusive too. 

So you're, so you're just adding to the problem that they're causing here as well, but it's in my pond. No one else's pond. In fact, I'm sure the statute of limitations is passed. 

So yes. All right. Well, Brian, I want to thank you for coming onto the show. 

Um, and for those people that are still listening and are watching and asking, uh, what the incident I was referring to about dissing Brian in Denver. So he and I had met on a zoom call probably what two weeks before that. And I was standing in line to register at the PAX eight event. 

And I was talking to somebody else and you walked up and said hello. And it's like, Oh, it's nice to meet you. And I'm like, who are you? I've got a forgettable face. 

So no worries. So, but, uh, here we are now. I appreciate you.

Not throwing me under the bus. Then we still had those meetings afterwards and for coming on the show and look forward to talking to you more down the road. Yeah. 

You too. Looking forward to part two, maybe three, four and five. If we decide we want to go that far, we can do that. 

Uh, so for those of you, I know it's coming up on the five o'clock hour. You're probably trying to get out and get home. So thank you for tuning into the show. 

For those of you listening by audio, thank you for downloading and subscribing. Uh, if this is your first time being exposed to this show, head over to itbusinesspodcast.com, hit the follow button and you can follow us on any of the pod catchers and follow us on social media, YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Facebook and be alerted anytime we have a show. I talked to other it owners, I talked to vendors and anybody else that's willing to help us out in the channel here and help us do our thing better. 

So that's going to do it folks. I'm heading off to tech con tomorrow. I will be there Friday, Saturday, fly back Sunday, and then next week's live show will be a conference wrap up. 

Of course, we'll talk swag and we'll talk about all the things we learned at tech con unplugged and uh, that'll do it. We'll see you all later. And until next time,